"Windows 7 might be a massive commercial success and an undeniably rock solid piece of software, but Microsoft is apparently unwilling to rest on those soft and cozy laurels. Asked about the riskiest product bet the Redmond crew is currently developing, its fearless leader Steve Ballmer took no time in answering 'the next release of Windows'." Also of note in this same video interview thing: Ballmer states that Silverlight is now pretty much strictly a client, non-cross platform thing, while explicitly stating that when it comes to doing something universal, "the world's gone HTML5".

You know, he could have said that about Vista, so it doesn't mean much. Longhorn was risky, and nothing came of it.

We have to be careful reading anything into Ballmer's remarks.

Nothing came of it? Windows Vista served as the foundation for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, two of Microsoft's most successful products in recent years. If it weren't for the changes made in Windows Vista such as the introduction of WDDM, DirectX 10, Media Foundation (to replace the spaghetti of competing decrepit API's), kernel scalability improvements and so forth Windows 7 would have become another Windows XP falling further behind its competition.

Windows Vista if viewed from an objective stand point established a new foundation on which future Windows will be built. When we are at Windows 9 maybe then people can be a little more intellectually honest and accept that maybe Windows Vista was necessary to bring about the big changes needed to push Windows ahead. Windows Vista was to Windows what Mac OS X 10.0 was to Mac OS X - a starting point upon which better things could be built.

Vista is not what Longhorn would have been. Vista is a failure born from the failure of Longhorn. A 2 years late and buggy OS without the nice Longhorn features such as WinFS or the real DWM with compiz like plugins On paper, Longhorn was better then 7 in term of features, but many of them never worked fine enough.

"You know, he could have said that about Vista, so it doesn't mean much. Longhorn was risky, and nothing came of it.

We have to be careful reading anything into Ballmer's remarks.

Nothing came of it? Windows Vista served as the foundation for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, two of Microsoft's most successful products in recent years. If it weren't for the changes made in Windows Vista such as the introduction of WDDM, DirectX 10, Media Foundation (to replace the spaghetti of competing decrepit API's), kernel scalability improvements and so forth Windows 7 would have become another Windows XP falling further behind its competition.

Windows Vista if viewed from an objective stand point established a new foundation on which future Windows will be built. When we are at Windows 9 maybe then people can be a little more intellectually honest and accept that maybe Windows Vista was necessary to bring about the big changes needed to push Windows ahead. Windows Vista was to Windows what Mac OS X 10.0 was to Mac OS X - a starting point upon which better things could be built. "

My short post was pretty simple, so I don't know how you misunderstood what I said. I didn't say that they didn't get anything out of Vista. I said:

"Longhorn was risky, and nothing came of it."

That being corrected, I have to say you're wrong. There was little really new about Vista. You don't remember anything about it? When Longhorn failed, they went back to Server 2003, I think it was, and used that, adding some features that were consumer oriented. they didn't take enough time to get it right, so it had a lot of problems. Remember that when Win 7 came out, Ballmer held up a box of it and said that Win 7 was; "Vista done right."

Good point, Vista was a crappy Beta of what turned into a decent product. The success of future products cannot retroactively make what was a bad product, good. It is never necessary for any company to release a crappy version of a product ahead of an actually decent version.

I fully agree on your Vista comments, I was one of those people with no Vista related problems even with pre-RC Vista. I only had 1 GB of RAM, 64 MB of VRAM for my trusty GeForce Go7x series, and a Core Duo CPU... Yet I was able to code with Visual Studio, Firefox, IE, VirtualPC 2007 running Windows Server 2003, and ISS running inside the guest OS all open at once . I welcomed the more responsive GUI thanks to Aero and the per application volume manager, ... Windows 7 did bring the best Taskbar out there though... It is a clone of the dock partially, but it has improved on the Dock so it is time for OS X to catchup there.

I think we are being unfair to Lion though... The only Lion exclusive piece we saw was the Launchpad, all the Mac App Store stuff is Snow Leopard compatible too and will launch in a short while.

Let's not forget that Lion's rollout is 1 year, from the first time it was shown to it's release date OS X took 1 year too, but at the time they already showed us Aqua... that is true.
What is also true is the fact that it was safer to show Aqua then, with no fear of the competition catching up (which it did with Vista, technologically, several years later), than it would be showing big UI changes now... The technology in Widows 7 is far closer to what Apple has in their sleeves than it used to be IMHO.

Microsoft can secure its investment: Make Windows expire or stop releasing security updates starting, say, 2012, and people will have to "upgrade" to Windows 8. Just like Microsoft did with Windows XP

You say "Make Windows expire". Which version of Windows are you referring to?

You may not know but Microsoft is still releasing security updates for XP SP 3. There's another news item in the RSS feed that says Microsoft is only now denying OEMs the right to use XP in netbooks. So... the ones that have been sold last month won't even have 18 months of security upgrades?

Anyway, I don't think the people who are currently using XP are that worried about security upgrades. In that respect, Vista is better than XP. I'm using XP SP 3 on a laptop that's always on, using an administrative account. Why? Because 1- the limited account is simply not usable on XP, 2- I don't put anything sensitive on that machine and 3- even on that old machine with that limited memory space, XP is the more responsive of the two systems I own.

Microsoft can secure its investment: Make Windows expire or stop releasing security updates starting, say, 2012, and people will have to "upgrade" to Windows 8. Just like Microsoft did with Windows XP

You mean "will do in 2014". Sure Microsoft stops issuing patches for the OSs eventually, but 13 years is a pretty good commitment overall. If XP is anything like 2000/NT4 that deadline will be extended a couple of times as well.

Actually, something did come out of it. Windows 7 (seeing that it's Windows NT 6.1) But it's like that when you have a major revision that rolls out. I mean, looks at Windows 95, it was risky, but from it came 98, which was miles better than 95.